At the end of 1940, it was estimated that the circulation of daily newspapers in the United States was around 41 million copies. It was a different world than today, the news of the war came either through the radio or through the photos that were the covers of the tabloids. That is why the curve began to rise steadily until the end of the 90s when there were more than 60 million according to the Pew Research Center.
But for the written press industry, The graph turned its direction and began to fall in the 2000s with the beginning of mass reading on the Internet, that figure dropped to more than 55 million. It does not mean that people stopped informing themselves, but rather that many migrated to new platforms.
In 2013 the contraction was already stronger, the number of printed editions was in the range of 40 to 41 million, and a decade later it fell almost 50% to 20.9 million.
Only in the last year, large chains began to cut staff, the famous Time magazine eliminated 15% of its staff in 2023, The Los Angeles Times did so at 20% of the total, and The Washington Post saw contracts for 240 employees end last December.
While printed newspapers contracted, there was a challenge in the migration of digital audiences, the report from the University of Columbia speaks of a change in investment in technology, multimedia and the internet “which grew 234% in the US media of written tradition, as they cut back on other categories to expand on social networks.”
In fact, at the end of last year, Mark Thompson, the former editor-in-chief at The New York Times who led the migration of digital content, arrived as CEO of CNN Worldwide. The executive now at the television network is studying salary cuts for his stars to allocate resources to the internet strategy.
Cross-platform crisis
On television, the crisis was seen instead in its audience. “Over several years of data, there has been a decline in local television news viewership, affecting both the morning and evening time slots. For example, “The average number of televisions tuning into the evening news from ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates was just over three million in 2022, up from just over four million in 2016.” said Michael Dimock, president of the Pew Research Center; “It is a notorious crisis, in audiences, in jobs and in how the media were forced to react,” he added.
In the decade from 2013 to 2023those same audiences among the main networks tracked the contraction was almost 40%.
In light of the audience figures in the American Union, not every campaign in a medium dedicated to reading on the Internet is synonymous with success. There must be deep work behind it, especially now when new generations consume less news in that country.
“Traffic to major digital news websites is not picking up,” they say at Columbia University. Overall, traffic to the most visited news websites (those with at least 10 million unique visitors per month in the fourth quarter of 2022) decreased over their previous two years. The average number of monthly unique visitors to these sites was 3% lower in October-December 2022 than in the same period in 2021, after a 13% drop the previous year, according to Comscore.
The average length of visit to these sites is also shortening. (These pages may include newspaper websites, such as The New York Times, as well as other digital news sites such as CNN, Fox News, or Axios.)
The report collected by the Pew Research Center says that “over several years of data, there has been a drop in the audience for local television news, affecting both the morning and evening time slots. For example, The average number of televisions tuning into the evening news from ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates was just over three million in 2022, up from more than four million in 2016.”
Generally speaking, for this reason, in the US, the media have had to cut their payrolls to respond to the apparent financial crisis in which the industry would be mired.
Time magazine CEO Jessica Sibley said the layoff decision was based on an attempt to boost the business and “improve its financial position as an organization.” “We have worked to aggressively manage expenses in other areas of our business to minimize the impact of this decision on our employees.”
According to Northwestern University, on average they are closing five local newspapers every two weeks in the United States after the crisis phenomenon that began.
